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Women With Wrenches

REPAIR ARTISTS K. T. Higgins, founder of the Bushwick Bike Shop in Brooklyn, with her daughter, Kacey Canales.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

ON most days, Katlyn Hershman can be found smeared with grease, plying her skills as a mechanic at Bike Works NYC, a shop on the Lower East Side. When she answers the store phone, though, all that toil and expertise can suddenly seem invisible.

“Guys automatically ask for the mechanic,” she said. “But I don’t really take it personally.”

Ms. Hershman, 25, has a loyal clientele of cyclists, both men and women. And she has the satisfaction of being one of a small but growing number of New York women making their mark in a trade that was a men-only preserve not so long ago.

In 1994, Karen Overton, a cycling advocate, founded Recycle-a-Bicycle in Manhattan as an after-school program to teach teenagers the basics of bicycle repair. To encourage girls to sign up, and to counter some parents’ objections that working on bikes was strictly for boys, she searched for female mechanics qualified to help teach.

Since then, as the number of cyclists in the city has soared — rising 30 percent from 2001 to 2008, according to a recent report by the Department of City Planning — so have the ranks of women riding bikes. Though male cyclists still outnumber them, the ratio has shrunk every year since 2003, to about three to one, according to current estimates.

At the same time, women have begun to appear in the back rooms of bike shops. “It’s still not easy to find female bike mechanics in the city,” Ms. Overton said. “But they’re definitely out there.”

Their presence can be partly credited to a weekly bike repair workshop for women called Ladies Night, which Ms. Overton began in 1997. During its 10-year run, the program drew hundreds of women, a number of whom became mechanics in some of New York’s best-known bike shops.

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Susan Lindell, works on a bicycle at the Recycle a Bicycle shop in Dumbo, Brooklyn.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Arone Dyer, 31, the former head mechanic and manager of Bike Works, got her start at Ladies Night. After two sessions, she persuaded Ms. Overton to let her work at Recycle-a-Bicycle’s East Village storefront “in exchange for bike parts,” Ms. Dyer said.

Like most bike mechanics, Ms. Dyer has always enjoyed working with her hands. Before becoming a mechanic, she worked as a landscaper, a floral arranger and a cabinetmaker. She has also built amplifiers and modified instruments, including a baritone ukulele, for her band, Buke and Gass. “It all relates to fixing bicycles,” she said.

Yet Ms. Dyer said she had to fight for respect in the male-dominated world of bike shops. “As a girl, you’re typically lumped into the category of ‘doesn’t know a thing,’ ” she said. “There’s a certain macho attitude that women can get intimidated by.”

Another Ladies Night alumna — K. T. Higgins, the founder of the Bushwick Bike Shop in Brooklyn, had a similar struggle. After arriving in New York in 1998 with little more than a BMX bike, Ms. Higgins worked as a bicycle messenger while doing sales work and fixing flats at Manhattan shops like Larry & Jeff’s and Sid’s Bikes.

Sensing that male mechanics “weren’t really taking me seriously,” she enrolled in two months of mechanics courses at the United Bicycle Institute in Portland, Ore. Upon her return to New York, she landed a mechanic’s job at Bicycle Doctor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and eventually opened her own shop.

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Not all female mechanics are bothered by the gender bias. Ms. Hershman of Bike Works said that after years spent in the metalworking studio at Pratt Institute, she was accustomed to working alongside men.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Hershman, flanked by two male mechanics, was hunched over a messenger’s fixed-gear bike, adding extra links to its chain. The messenger, Art Stowers, 28, sat on a bench nearby.

“It must be tough being a chick in this business,” he said. “But I come to Katlyn if there’s anything I can’t fix myself. She just knows more than me.”

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New York's female bike mechanics include Katlyn Hershman of Bike Works NYC in ManhattanCredit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Some shop owners cite advantages to hiring women as mechanics. Dave Perry said that since he opened Bike Works 12 years ago, he had hired five or six. “There’s a real sensitivity involved in repairing bikes, and it’s nice to have girls for that reason,” he said.

“A lot of women customers would probably prefer to talk to a woman mechanic,” he added.

Sensitivity to customers was one reason New York magazine chose Ms. Higgins as the city’s best bike mechanic last year.

“I’m definitely not the best skill-wise,” Ms. Higgins said, adding that she knew “much better mechanics, guys with 30 years of experience.”

Her priority, she said, has always been to make customers feel comfortable. “I’ve worked with a lot of surly and condescending dudes in my career,” she said, “and they taught me how not to act.”

After two “dark and scary” years working alone at the Bushwick Bike Shop, Ms. Higgins said, she was finally able to hire two mechanics this year — both men. “They’ve got their attitude issues,” she said, laughing. “But they’ve adjusted that because of me.”

Their hiring coincided with the birth of Ms. Higgins’s first child, and she has since stepped away from the repair stand to keep track of the accounts.

“This is just a hiatus, though, because of the baby thing,” she said. “I’m dying to get my hands dirty again.”

In the booming local bike business, employing a female mechanic has even acquired a certain cachet.

Today, Recycle-a-Bicycle has a total of four at its locations in the East Village and the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. One mechanic, Natalie Feliciano, 20, a sophomore at Bronx Community College, began working at the East Village shop as a high school freshman and is now an assistant manager. Lately, she said, owners of several new shops in the area have tried to poach her — to no avail.

“They think more people will come if there’s a young female mechanic at the shop,” she said recently, taking a break from overhauling a beat-up Trek mountain bike. “And they’re probably right.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2011, on Page MB8 of the New York edition with the headline: Women With Wrenches. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe